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Brick Paver Patterns and Styles

As is obvious to those who peruse this blog, I have had a fairly mad love affair of long duration with brick pavers as surface products, from roads to driveways to sidewalks to patios. Their elegant mosaic-like segmented beauty just appeals to me in its complexity. I have become particularly enthused about the concrete products but those old clay-fired bricks from homes and mostly re-used siding bricks can also make wonderful paving materials. They of course are just as segmented and are often even prettier in their rustic quality.

Here, for example, is a project we undertook just recently in Louisville, utilizing a Craiglist ad for a bunch of “old brick” someone wanted to dispose of. Needless to say the price was right, but the finished product we thought was equally satisfying.

From the back porch – nice, simple, durable and ready for the foliage surrounding it to expand and soften things nicely:

At times, simpler is just better. While strictly rectangular, a more plastic sort of design featuring gentle curves and a more rounded shape in general treat these rigid blocks as elements of more natural and more intriguing shapes.

But some patterns come already circular! From Pavestone, a product I have used many times, this gorgeous and simple integration of a small circle in an otherwise standard pattern:

Installers and designers have long since employed circular pattern insertions as points of interest and complexity. Brick Paver suppliers have oodles of “circular kits” with premade patterns which are easy to install.

Hardheads like me, however, occasionally go for the circular look as a second thought, opting to work like mad just to make things marginally more interesting for a client. What results, of course, is an absurd amount of crafty cutting, using standard bricks as our material and adapting their size to the circularity. On bricks which have an “antiqued look”, we also chip at the edges ourselves toi maintain the appearance of age and wear.

But the variety of styles and patterns in the preformed brick-laying dimension has moved along, offering some gorgeous options in terms of coloring and shape.

The shade of this one is called “Cream and Tan” and the overall style is referred to as “Bishop’s Hat”.:

This rustic little design is a tumbled paver, composed of so many different sizes and shapes that we decided to use a completely random pattern in laying it.

The rougher, more rustic “tumbled” look has an implicit sort of aged quality – like an instant antique:

Among other virtues of these, more “imperfect” pavers revolve around the grouting, using different colored sands for the “infill” for the cracks between the bricks. With the overall coating of a coat of good sealer, the sand stays permanent and accents the stones with interest and a very functional role.